toastykitten

• Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam says no plans to use emergency powers for other laws - uh huh
• Vox explainer on the NBA caving to China. 
• Joe Tsai, owner of the Nets, explaining why the Hong Kong protests are a third rail by calling it a separatist movement, and how free speech may be an American value, but we should also shut up because it hurts Chinese people's feelings because China lost to imperialism or something. Conveniently also neglected to say that he was born in Taiwan, educated in the US, and holds a Canadian passport. Also neglected to mention that he is the vice chairman of Alibaba, and thus also a mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party.
• Also, at this point, the Hong Kong protests are not a separatist movement. They do not have that kind of power, they know they don't have that kind of international defense, and their requests are calling for the government to follow the rule of law that was promised them in the handover. But if they keep up that sort of name-calling, I'm sure soon it will be a separatist movement. 
• US blacklists Chinese surveillance companies over human rights abuses - I'm really not sure what to make of this, and I'm sure it'll be reversed by the end of the week or something.
• The NBA is fake woke. Something something capitalism at work. 
• 'South Park' Episode Mocks Hollywood for Shaping Stories to Please China - I also resent these events for making me care, even a little bit, about what South Park has to say about anything. 

Random thought - Russia is way better at the propaganda game because they legit don't seem to care what Americans think of them, but China is the biggest baby on the world powers block and can't stand any sort of criticism whatsoever. 

• Fashionista posts an entire issue of Sassy. The one with Mayim Bialik on the cover, in case you're wondering.
• Daily Show interview with Josh Rushing.

• Phallus forest in Thailand.
• A blog about Chinese science fiction, fantasy and mainstream fiction.
• Freakonomics interview with Karen Abbott about some pretty savvy businesswomen.

Still tired.

Just read:

Roger Ebert's I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie - I adore Ebert, but I really do not need him to tell me what he finds erotic. There's a reason why MOST movie critics don't talk about it, Ebert. Anyway, overall, the book was really funny, and mostly well-written. He gets so hung up on logic sometimes, though, that I think he forgets to actually talk about the movie. Who cares what the alien bugs do or don't eat?

Marc Romano's Crossworld: One Man's Journey into America's Crossword Obsession. This book is not about all crosswords, but about one reporter's attendance of a crossword tournament run by Will Shortz, the guy who edits the New York Times puzzles. This is a fluffy and dorky book. I finished it over two train rides, and thought it was okay but not great. At least I found out why I couldn't finish any of the crossword puzzles in one particular book I bought my last year of college. It was probably edited by Eugene Maleska, who was apparently this puzzle editor who didn't like people putting in clues that are relevant after 1960.

Independent Publishing Deathwatch:
My magazine holders are starting to hold a lot of dead magazines. I have the following: Budget Living, Kitchen Sink, Arthur Frommer's Smart Shopping, and now Punk Planet. However, not everything is dead. I would totally subscribe to Monocle, if only it weren't so damn expensive.

Just watched:

John From Cincinnati - I didn't like this first episode much at all; this whole "mysterious stranger changes the lives of a family" felt like it was just trying way too hard to be weird and mysterious. I wasn't buying it.

Top Chef - The first episode seemed promising. I hated Hung, the guy who's friends with Marcel from Season 2. I know they're angling that guy as "person you love to hate", but I just hate him not only for being smug, but for trying too hard to be smug.

Mark playing Nintendo games. So I guess the patents on the games expired? He bought this console thingamajig and bought some games like Zelda to return to his childhood. He has a PS2 and he hasn't touched that in 2 years. But he brought this home last night and it's like he can't stop. It's so cute.

Online:
Virtual China's blog post on child slave labor in China.
Global Voices post on slave labor in Shanxi.

I enjoy reading SFist because it tells me stuff like 880 commute sucks the most - and why does it suck? People really don't know how to merge on very well. Also, the MacArthur Maze. Fucking death trap.

From Global Voices - pictures of Tai Hu, a freshwater lake in China that is pretty polluted. We went there on our tour, and I guess we got to see the non-polluted side. It sucks, because it's a gorgeous site.

NotCouture - new fashion blog. Drool over pretty things.

I totally WISH I could see this: Damon Albarn of Gorillaz fame collaborates with Chen Shi-Zheng to create a new version of the Monkey King. Animation, too!

Am home sick today, but I can't sleep, so I give you links!

• Latest issue of Jump Cut - this month's theme is China and China diaspora film. I have not read this yet, but it seems interesting, and an academic dissection of Kung Fu Hustle sounds like fun.
  
• GreenCine interview with the stars of Hot Fuzz. I can't wait to see this movie.
• Mike Daisey talks to the guy who dumped water on his notes. I really admire Mike Daisey's approach to how he handled this. Plus his act was really funny and it's stupid that he got so rudely interrupted like that.
• I usually like 60 Minutes, and I'll even concede Anderson Cooper can be pretty. But I hated his "Stop Snitching" segment, in which he blames hip hop for being the cause of black people not talking to police. I mean, really, it wasn't maybe Rodney King or Amadou Diallo? Or even just the collective and justified distrust of police that police have done nothing to mitigate? Hip hop is not just Cam'ron, okay? I wouldn't talk to the police, either, unless I absolutely had to. I have no street cred to protect, but where I come from I've yet to see the police live up to their actual job descriptions. It was overall just lazy, lazy journalism. I'd go on but I think I would explode.

Guangzhou was a short flight from Hangzhou. After everyone waited forever and a day for their luggage, we took off for our hotel. Some of the tour people were going elsewhere, and the rest were going to visit relatives either in Guangzhou, Hong Kong or neighboring villages. Getting to the hotel was a relief. All we did was sleep for the entire day, and my parents made arrangements with my cousin Nina to see us for dinner later.

You know what was also a relief? Speaking in Cantonese! In Guangzhou, I could be understood, and even find my way around if I wanted to. I felt like less of a stranger in someone's house, and more like I was home.

Guangzhou was hot and humid. We broke into a sweat every time we went outside, even at night. For dinner, Nina took us to a Macau restaurant, and it was the best meal of the entire trip so far. I don't remember much of what we ate except crunchy, delicious, tasty, tasty fried pork skin. Nina seemed pretty cool - she was a little older than my oldest sister, but still very nice and not motherly at all. She worked for Mary Kay, and was hoping to be able to get a work trip out to the U.S. It would have to be in Dallas, though. We found out then that she had applied to go to college in the U.S., but was denied based on the fact that her mother and one of her sisters already lived in the U.S., and the government thought that she would attempt to stay past her student visa. (Well, wouldn't you?) She had no way of seeing her mother except when her mother occasionally went back to China to visit, and that happens at most, once a year. Anyway, I later discovered that she was also divorced due to infertility, whether on her part or the ex's part was never determined. It was something that no one really talked about.

On the way out we bagged some leftovers and my mom got accosted by some beggar kids, who came up to her and pointed at her grocery bags. Nina stopped my mom from giving them anything, saying they had someone taking care of them and were there only to rip off unsuspecting tourists.

Afterwards, my parents got really tired and went to sleep early. Nina took me and two of my sisters out for a night on the town. We went to where all the "goo-wahk jai lui" kicked it, in a little shopping area that no tour bus would ever take us to. The shopping area was filled with the youth of China smoking, drinking, playing cards in the alleys, and totally not wearing deodorant at all. The uniform of the moment seemed to be crimped hair, baggy pants, sweatshirts and a cigarette. All the shops were really tiny and crowded, and smelled like a blend of alcohol and sweat. Nina was an expert bargainer, and helped my sister bargain to get some cute anime shirts and nice jewelry. I am in awe of her bargaining powers, because she held her ground no matter how hard the seller cajoled and wheedled, and she got what she wanted.  She was also going to take us to snack on some street food, but by the time we got there it already closed.

She took us back to our hotel and wouldn't let us pay for cab fare. We American-born haven't learned the stubbornness of holding our ground like they have. Oh well. Anyway, we promised to see her again if we came back, and hopefully she'll get a chance to come visit us.

Hangzhou was our last stop before the end of the tour. It was also one of my favorite places because it was so beautiful and CLEAN. For the past ten days my snot had been coming out black, but it was actually starting to clear up a little here. We were given a terrible tour guide, who kept punctuating every sentence with "Ah"! Granted, the other tour guides whose Cantonese was not their first dialect did it, too, but they didn't do it as much as this one. "Ah! We are at the tomb of YuFei. Ah! He was a war hero. Ah!"

We were told by Leslie that the reason Hangzhou was so beautiful was because of Nixon's historic visit to China. Hangzhou was one of his stops, and he made an offhand comment about how it was beautiful, but kind of old-looking. So then the Hangzhou government decided to clean it up and make it into a really beautiful place. It is actually pretty crazy - if you compare it to the crowdedness and smog-filled cities like Shanghai and Beijing. You can actually breathe in Hangzhou, and have some semblance of a private space.

We walked around SaiWu, or West Lake, and also took a short boat ride that was pretty awesome. I loved all the landscapes, and we passed by several people who had rented their own boats for the afternoon. A Mongolian tour group passed us and started singing loudly in their own language - they were wearing their own country's clothes - furs and all - and all of them had very red, sunburnt faces.

After the boat ride was a visit to the temple and tomb of YuFei, who as far as I could tell was a war hero in some far off dynasty. We were informed that most of the original tomb had been ransacked and destroyed during the Cultural Revolution (at least I think that's what she said) and that many of the items we saw, such as statues, and paintings, were pieced together afterwards.

Hangzhou is famous for their tea leaves, supposedly some of the best in the world. So of course our government sponsored tour stop for the day is a tea house where they sell us tea leaves at fucking outrageous prices. And I mean prices that would be outrageous even in America. Our salesman talked a lot about the antioxidant benefits of green tea, which I was with him on until he told us that some dude had been injecting the AIDS virus into watermelons and that you could actually get AIDS that way. The implication being that drinking green tea would purify the AIDS virus out of you. "Don't worry, he has been caught." I shot my sister a look and could hardly hold my laughter in.

Oh, and this may be a betrayal of my heritage but I thought the Chinese green tea was way too bitter. I prefer the Japanese kind.

God, Chinese medicine.

Our next stop was actually for Chinese medicine. This won raves all over the bus, as many of the tour participants were old immigrants and had various aches and pains, and believed that the stankier something was, the better it was for you. My sister and I joined my mom in a room where the salesman gave us some handouts. My sister and I were given the English translation, which was full of grammatical errors and almost seemed to hail from a different universe. What is "wind-phlegm"? I still have the paper somewhere.

My sister and I had to leave the room, though, when the salesperson started rubbing free samples of ointments all over people. You would have thought he was giving out gold or something, the way people were like, "Hey, over here! My back hurts!" Have you ever smelled Tiger Balm? It's a god-awful smelling herbal ointment that people (even Mark's mom uses it) use to rub on places that hurt. Picture an enclosed space with thirty people clamoring to be rubbed with something even more foul-smelling than that.

Ugh. Yeah, so we had to leave the room. The front had a display of various Chinese alternative medicines with probably mislabelled English - many of them said "Semen _____". There was one of dried human placenta. You can probably see the rest on my Flickr page.

After dinner we saw an acrobat show that was supposed to showcase all of Chinese history, I think. I think one of the dancers was Indian - she didn't look very Chinese to me. It was pretty cool and my parents both loved it. I couldn't get any good pictures on my camera though.

Afterwards Leslie mentioned that he competed in a singing competition once and had even been offered a record contract. He turned it down because he was in school at the time. Anyway, he serenaded us with a few songs - the first one, from Leslie Cheung's archive, the second one, Andy Lau's "mong ching sui" and the third, Teresa Teng's famous song whose title escapes me.

At the hotel, I was relieved to find out that our beds were soft.

The next day, Guangzhou!

But I'm not. I'll probably do that after dinner.

Work is going to be excruciatingly quiet next week, as most of the people in my department have taken off for vacation. Mark is in LA - next year we'll have to figure out a better holiday schedule. Both our families make big deals of the holidays, although Chinese New Year is a bigger deal. And then it's about the only time I see my nieces and nephews and hopefully undo a bit of the years of damage they have coming to them.

My sister tells me that she just saw Kaitlin's report card, and she's doing quite well - she's actually caught up with other kids her age. It turns out that she's pretty good at math. My sister got her a workbook so that she can work on learning about negative numbers. You know what's funny? Her English is getting so good she's starting to translate for me with my mom. I hardly even realized she was doing it, until she said to my mom, "What she's trying to say is that..." and I thought Oh my god is my Chinese that awful? Apparently it is.

I just got a letter from my adopted brother's daughter. It's a long story about how he was "adopted", and how the circumstances of his adoption created a lot of drama in my family - I'm not going to go into it. I guess technically she's my niece. Anyway, the name she chose for herself is Crystal. I spent some time with her in the village - she's about 18 and about to take the entrance exam for university. She was a bit shy at first, but Crystal talks. And talks. And talks. In fact, in the three or four days I spent with her, I don't think I said more than ten sentences. Her letter is short, though, and I wonder if she didn't have enough paper or something. She keeps telling me how beautiful I am, which is really unnerving. I think she's probably translating from her Chinese literally to English, which makes her sentences sound very odd. I'll probably write her after dinner. I'm going to have to get my parents to write the address, though.

Some stuff I've been thinking about:

Did you know that some teenagers make money by teaching people how to play Halo? Are you fucking kidding me? They also get paid $25 an hour, which is way too close to my actual salary for comfort. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! Not that I'd be any good at this - I suck at video games.

Harold McGee lives close enough to me that he can drive to the Ranch 99 at Milpitas.

I found out that Six Apart's offices are only a couple of blocks up from my work. That is so odd. Current_TV is also in the building next to mine. I walk by sometimes and am so tempted to walk in - you can see the workers, dressed like skater boys watching their stuff. And all I can think is, Are they working or goofing off?

My China photos are slowly coming up. I'm so glad Flickr increased their bandwith limit. I'm up to Hangzhou right now, and will post up pictures of my parents' villages next. If you actually want to see my family, you'll have to add me as a contact first. There are also no pictures of me, unless you want to look at the New Orleans pictures.

Oh hey! New Asian-Am show, called My Life Disoriented. Did they make one of the Asians goth? Or is that just a white guy in heavy makeup? Time to add to the TiVo list.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Season's Greetings, etc!

It's customary for people when they go to China, to bring back stuff for family and friends. My parents got a little something for Mark.

Playboy dress socks. With the bunny logo and everything.

In China, my sister had to stop my mom from buying a shirt with the word "sex" on it. She liked it because it was pink, I think.

My notes for the first day in Nanjing is really short. I know we got introduced to Leslie, a tour guide and native of Nanjing who would accompany us throughout the tour. He looked like this Taiwanese singer/actor that I used to think was cute. He was fairly young - only a year older than me, actually, and he talked a lot about how much he loved his mom. It got my parents clapping, as he went on and on about filial piety, and made me and my sisters roll our eyes.

In Nanjing we visited Sun Yat-Sen's mausoleum. You had to climb something like three hundred steps to get to it. Did I mention how many tripping hazards China has? There's no such thing as "wheelchair accessible". I tripped over everything - in restaurants, random rooms would be slightly raised a few inches over the actual floor, for no reason I could discern - it wasn't for aesthetics, that's for sure. It drove me crazy.

Sun Yat-Sen's body is actually up there in the mausoleum.  There are also a couple of pots that were shot at by the Japanese. The holes were never mended, to remind us of what the Japanese did. Here, we were informed that any Japanese person visiting Nanjing is required by the government to visit all the memorial sites. Hence, no Japanese ever visit Nanjing.

I know we went to a jade place. That was boring. And expensive. I note in my journal that the funny thing about all the government-sponsored tourist shops is that they all seem to be staffed by young women. Shortage of females in China? Not in these shops - they outnumber male staff 10 to 1. And they are so, so pushy. They will not physically let go of you until you purchase something. I had to do a lot of ducking to avoid being caught in their clutches.

We also went to visit the Yangtze, I think, which is actually called something else in Cantonese. I don't remember what it's called. The weather was starting to get cold, so our pictures didn't come out that well. In the building where we stopped, we met a government-paid artist who painted stuff inside crystal balls. It's a lot prettier than I'm making it sound. My parents bought a few.

Next day is WuXi, where we'll go to Taihu, a great lake.